Tomorrow it will be one whole year since the Supreme Court concluded hearings in the corruption case against Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa in the Tansi land deal—the case which cost her her job two years ago.But as the bench headed by Justice S Rajendra Babu has so far not delivered its verdict, the Jayalalithaa case has emerged as the face of the growing problem of judgments being reserved by superior courts for prolonged periods, sometimes stretching to two years or beyond.Jayalalithaa’s case involves two appeals filed by DMK lawyer Sai Bharati and Janata Party president Subramanium Swamy against the Madras High Court verdict of December 2001 acquitting Jayalalithaa and paving the way for her comeback as chief minister two months later.The high court set aside her conviction in October 2000 by the trial court, which had given her a sentence of three years and thereby disqualified her from contesting the last assembly elections in Tamil Nadu in May 2001.The Supreme Court’s delay in pronouncing its judgment on the appeals is ironical because this was the very corruption case in which its bench headed by Justice S P Bharucha unseated her in September 2001 for having been sworn in as chief minister despite her electoral disqualification at that time.The delay in such a high-profile and politically far-reaching case also flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s own judgment of 2001 in Anil Rai vs State of Bihar laying down guidelines for high courts to check the trend of ‘‘many cases remain(ing) in the area of ‘judgment reserved’ for long periods.’’But given the example set by the apex court itself, the high courts have so far not bothered to enforce any of the five remedial measures enumerated by Justice R P Sethi in the Anil Rai case.The salient reforms that still remain on paper are radical:• Sethi prescribed that a column be added on the front page of the judgment indicating the date on which the arguments concluded.• If a judgment is reserved beyond three months, any of the parties is empowered to file an application praying for an early verdict.• If the delay exceeds six months, a party can ask the Chief Justice to withdraw the case from the original bench and ‘‘make it over to any other bench for fresh arguments.’’Despite such powers conferred on litigants, the bar has been wary of using them lest they embarrass the defaulting judges and incur their wrath.In a concurring verdict in the same Anil Rai case, Justice K T Thomas said that the Constitution does not deal with this problem ‘‘presumably because the architects of the Constitution believed that no high court judge would cause such long and distressing delays.’’ But this expectation, he admitted, ‘‘remained unsullied’’ only during the early years.Explaining the adverse effects of delayed judgments, Thomas said: ‘‘Judges themselves normally forget the details of the facts and niceties of the legal points advanced. Sometimes the interval is so long that the judges forget even the fact that such a case is pending with them expecting judicial verdict. Though it is an unpleasant fact, it is a stark reality.’’Tailpiece: In connection with a question in the Rajya Sabha, the Centre asked the high courts last year to provide statistics of the cases in which judgments are reserved for more than one year.On May 10, 2002, the Delhi high court declined to give any details saying ‘‘the nature of the information sought directly relates to the discharge of judicial functions of judges and it impinges upon judicial independence and institutional autonomy.’’
